My thoughts exactly! sigh I switched to Apple after having used various GNU/Linux distributions for years. I spent a lot of time tinkering with the system. Apple appeared to offer a fix to this problem, and it just works—most of the time. When it doesn’t work, though…

Sorry to hear you’re in iPad hell. I just brought on line a 2 TB external (2 TB … and I recall the days of tape) for my media. In my case, it was the prior drive going down, taking all the music with it (and nearly the !MacBook, whose hd was also entirely full). Managed to recover an old episode of the podcast, plus (thanks to iCloud, I’ll admit) a ton of music.